Hello folks, I've read today a wonderful guide on iLounge for copying music back from your iPod to the computer, and of course what to do in case of an iPod hard drive failure. Its a must read for any serious iPod user.
Every experienced iPod users have experienced a least once. You listen to your beautiful Top Rated playlist when all of a sudden the hard drive decides its time to make a noise and stop spinning. All sorts of scary thoughts running thorough your mind, but don't worry, this guide is just for you, and its going to tell you exactly what's the possible solutions and what you should do. The No.1 thing any experienced iPod users should do is backup your entire iPod to your computer hard drive, that way in case anything goes wrong, you can always whip your iPod clean and start over without losing any what your data. There are many 3rd party applications that do just that and much more and some of them are 100% free, unfortunately iTunes doesn't really provide a complete solution to back up your iPod mainly because Apple tries to combat piracy and thereby maintain good relations with the music labels that are currently selling their content via Apple’s iTunes Store. So lets have a look at some of the different solutions there:
- CopyTrans (formerly CopyPod)
CopyTrans (formerly CopyPod) is a tool designed with one very specific purpose in mind: To copy, recover, or backup your iPod content onto your computer, and it does this exceptionally well. This was one of the first Windows utilities available that could actually recover almost all of the important metadata from the iPod database such as playlists, ratings, play count, and last played times, making it one of the more full-featured iPod recovery solutions.
CopyTrans provides options for simply copying your iPod content back to a directory on your computer, optionally writing an iTunes XML file in the process that can be manually imported into iTunes, or it can handle the entire iTunes import process for you, bringing back all of your ratings, playlists, play counts, and last played dates, essentially restoring a completely lost iTunes library to most of its former glory.
- iGadget (formerly PodPlus)
Mac/Windows, $15, 15-day trial available
From an iPod recovery point of view, iGadget is not particularly exceptional, however it offers a number of additional iPod features that may be worth a look for some, including the ability to sync up-to-date RSS feeds, weather forecasts and even local gas prices onto your iPod, and the ability to use any empty space on your iPod to backup/sync files from your computer.
The actual media transfer and playlist transfer features are relatively straightforward, however a two-step process is required to recover both music and playlists, with separate functions to transfer songs and transfer playlists.
iGadget can be used to simply transfer songs to your hard drive, or you can have it automatically add the transferred songs to iTunes.
- SharePod
On the Windows side, SharePod provides a free basic iPod management solution that will also allow for the recovery of playlists and ratings, although metadtata such as play counts and last played dates are not recovered. Further, SharePod does not handle the process of importing this data into iTunes automatically, instead creating an XML file in the target directory that can be imported manually via iTunes’ File, Import function.
Using SharePod for iPod recovery is fairly straightforward. Simply select the tracks and/or playlist that you wish to recover, and click the “Copy to PC” button.
SharePod will prompt you for which directory to recover these tracks to, and how you want these tracks to be named. You can select from several pre-sets using the drop-down box, or you can type in your own format, using some of the basic tags such as Artist, Album, and Track Number.
Once you’ve specified the directory and the naming format, SharePod will copy all of the tracks to the destination folder. A file named “SharePod_iTunes_Import.xml” will also be created in the destination folder. This file can be imported into iTunes using the File, Import function to add these tracks to your iTunes library, along with their playlist and rating information.
Have a look at iLounge for the full guide, its really a must read website for any serious iPod owner.
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